On November 10, 1975, a massive freighter carrying twenty-nine men and more than 26,000 tons of taconite iron ore went down in the icy waters of Lake Superior. Less than a year later, in August 1976, Canadian songwriter Gordon Lightfoot wrote his masterpiece ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” making it one of the best-known and most haunting disasters in modern nautical history.
What happened that night has been the subject of at least a half dozen prior books and decades of debates, still ongoing, over who was to blame for the disaster and what lessons can be drawn from it. Most recently, Thomas M. Nelson, an occasional contributor to The Progressive, has entered this canon with his highly readable and engaging new book, Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy.
Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy
By Thomas M. Nelson with Jerald Podair
Michigan State University Press, 222 pages
Publication date: August 1, 2025
Nelson is the elected county executive of Outagamie County, Wisconsin. A former state legislator, he also ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. He wrote this book, his second, with assistance from Jerald Podair, a professor of history at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Wrecked aims to put the ship’s sinking into a broader political and socioeconomic context. It includes material from interviews with surviving family members and others whose lives were altered by what happened to the Fitzgerald. The ship’s ill-fated crew members are presented as ordinary heroes—hardworking men who “took it upon themselves to ensure the Great Lakes economy remained strong” and that “every child had a shot at the American dream.” The book aims to honor their sacrifice.
Nelson re-envisions the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald—named after an executive at the Milwaukee insurance company that owned it—as a kind of morality play about the declining fortunes of labor, organized and otherwise. The ship, in his telling, met its fate not “because of the rough winter waters it would experience but because of blatant corporate malfeasance and flawed and ineffective government oversight.” For many years, he writes, “the Fitzgerald’s owners maintained her on the cheap” and Coast Guard inspectors overlooked serious problems.
Michigan State University Press
In 1975, when concerns were raised about the condition of the ship’s hull, later seen as a key factor in its sinking, the Fitzgerald’s captain, Ernest McSorley, is said to have replied, “I don’t give a fuck. All this son of a bitch has got to do is stay together one more year. After that I don’t give a shit what happens to it.” The captain, of course, went down with his ship.
The book goes back and forth between issues dealing with the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the economic forces in play at various moments over the past century of U.S. history. It’s an audacious conceit, remarkable for its freshness. What does the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which weakened the power of labor unions, have to do with the peril visited on what Lightfoot called this “good ship and crew” decades later? Perhaps a stronger labor movement then would have leveraged better maintenance and a deeper commitment to worker safety. It’s a stretch, but also a good exercise.
Wrecked includes a call for the revitalization of the shipping industry—or how “a new public-private sector business model not unlike that of the past could rebuild the industry and spur a renaissance in American manufacturing.” Nelson imagines shipbuilding as being among the career options for his own young son, if only “we make good on the legacy of the Fitzgerald by rebuilding our shipping economy and securing our economic and national security.”
On the big lake they call “Gitche Gumee,” stranger things have happened.